Future Skills & Innovation Symposium
Hotel Sofitel, Mumbai, India
18.30, Tuesday, 27 November 2012
Minister, Ambassador, Honorary Consul, Ladies and Gentlemen. It’s a great pleasure to be here. Thank you for inviting me.
I’m here in two capacities – firstly, as Provost of Trinity College Dublin, which is Ireland’s highest-ranking university, and ranked 67th in the world according to QS. Trinity is committed to innovation, which is often referred to as the third pillar of university activity, together with research and innovation.
Personally, I prefer to think of innovation not as a separate pillar, but as permeating the university’s mission in both education and research.
I’m also addressing you in my capacity as a member of the governing board of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (the EIT), a body of the European Union whose mission is to increase Europe’s growth and competitiveness by reinforcing innovation capacity. The EIT governing board has 22 members, representing a balance of individuals active across education, research, and business. It was a great honour for me to be appointed to this board - I take it as a tribute to both Ireland’s and Trinity’s commitment to innovation.
So today I’d like to talk to you about three things:
- First, I’ll tell you a bit about EIT and how it proposes to reinforce European innovation;
- Leading on from this, I’ll look at how we encourage the skills necessary for innovation in Trinity;
- And from Trinity, I’ll take a brief look at what innovation in Ireland might look like, if we get it right.
(1) E.I.T.
EIT’s mission is to foster a new generation of entrepreneurs and innovators. We recognise that Europe, like India, is teeming with ideas and with gifted people, but that too often ideas remain abstract, and people’s potential remains unrealised. So we need to create pathways, new opportunities, for people to move from the ideas phase into something concrete and profitable. In short, we want to facilitate the transitions … … … …
- from idea to product,
- from lab to market,
- and from student to entrepreneur.
How do we do this? By greatly facilitating common working between education, the business community, and research and technology.
The EIT views these three sectors as a “Knowledge Triangle”, as on this slide.
Higher Education is of course universities; Business is the private commercial sector; and Research and Technology are State funded research institutes such as the Max Planck scientific research organisation in Germany, or in Ireland, Teagasc, the Agriculture and Food Development authority.
EIT has created structures, which we call Knowledge and Innovation Communities, or KICs, to integrate the three sides of the Knowledge Triangle.
(2) INNOVATION SKILLS IN TRINITY
That, broadly, is the EIT’s framework for fostering innovation in the EU.
In Trinity College Dublin, we understand the role we play within the Knowledge Triangle. We recognise that in the past twenty years a revolution has taken place in universities around the world – staff and students are now encouraged to use their research to directly grow the economy and serve society.
This new focus on academic entrepreneurship promotes a wonderful sense of excitement around, and responsibility towards, research. It has meant that spin-out companies are now a normal, valued output of university activities. And it has meant more international research collaborations to ensure that the best global research goes into creating the products and services. Research today is only commercially valuable if it excels on the world stage – impact cannot be achieved behind national borders anymore.
I want to look at how these two innovation pathways – campus companies and international research collaborations – work in Trinity. But first, allow me to look briefly at the type of education we offer in Trinity – because of course the type of research and education influences the type of innovation.
Trinity innovation: interdisciplinary and global
Certain things characterise the Trinity innovation. I want to highlight two: interdisciplinarity and global connectivity.
Trinity is a large, multidisciplinary university of 24 Schools, ranging from Business, Drama, and Law, ... ... to Chemistry, Engineering, and Medicine.
We encourage research collaborations and joint programmes between Schools and Departments, and we now have five multidisciplinary Trinity Research Institutes – for
- Biomedical Sciences,
- Nanoscience,
- International Integration,
- Neuroscience, and
- Arts and Humanities.
These research institutes combine the strengths of several different Schools. For instance, Principal Investigators in our Neuroscience Institute hail from a wide range of disciplines, including Psychology, Biochemistry, Engineering, Psychiatry and Genetics.
What this means, in terms of innovation, is that products and services arising from Trinity research tend to be interdisciplinary, and that Trinity researchers seek industry partners in diverse fields.
Another of Trinity’s core, traditional strengths lies in our international identity and global connectivity. Since our foundation, 420 years ago, we have always been outward-looking. Trinity’s engagement with Asia began in 1762 with the appointment of Mir Aulad Ali, an Indian Muslim known as ‘The Mir’, as Professor of Arabic, Hindustani, and Persian. During the nineteenth century, Trinity - together with Oxford, Cambridge and Edinburgh - trained generations of young men for the Indian Civil Service.
And in the twentieth century, Trinity had a truly international student profile, with the medical and engineering Schools in particular boasting numerous students from Asia and Africa.
We’re proud of our international heritage, and this year we decided to formalise it. Last month we launched our global relations strategy, which addresses a number of key actions, including:
- increasing the number of international students coming to Trinity;
- creating more student exchanges programmes, particularly for undergraduates so they can learn global citizenship; and
- further connecting with our global alumni.
What all this means in terms of innovation - is that products and services arising from our research are likely to have an international dimension.
Trinity Innovation Pathways
Now I want to look at how we move from our interdisciplinary, international research to products and services. All good universities are incubation centres for ideas – creative spaces if you like - but what distinguishes world-class ‘innovation universities’ is the ability to build “innovation pathways” so that staff and students can move beyond the ideas phase. Let’s look at some of the innovation pathways we’ve built in Trinity:
International research collaborations
Our emphasis on global excellence means that we actively seek research partners abroad. I’ll take one example – a bioengineering project between Trinity and the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur.
The project – as can be seen on this slide – is titled “Mechano-regulation of gene expression in articular cartilage development”. It concerns the bioengineering of cartilage for transplantation into humans.
It’s a crucial project with obvious societal impact, it’s jointly funded by Trinity and by India’s Ministry of Science and Technology, under the India-Ireland cooperative science programme, and it’s a great example of scientific collaboration between our two institutes and two countries. Recently this student Anurati Saha has been employed as a PhD researcher on the project.
Innovation and Technology showcase: the funnel
Once a research project has reached a level where it is ready to find business partners for licensing or further investment, it can be showcased by the university.
This slide is from Trinity’s annual Innovation and Technology showcase (http://www.tcd.ie/research_innovation/assets/PDF%20Open%20Access/TCD%20Showcase%202012%20brochure.pdf). The slide shows 36 research ideas ready for commercialization. The ideas then enter into what we think of as “a funnel”, where they progress from licenses, to business partners, to investments to sales, each development stage classified in the ‘funnel’. We track these to ensure as many as possible get investment and create jobs. For example, Emizar, number 34 here in the funnel, is at the investment stage.
This funnel is created by Trinity staff, with financial support from Enterprise Ireland, which is the government agency for development and growth of Irish enterprises in world markets.
With reference to the EIT and its ‘Knowledge Triangle’ between higher education, business, and research and technology – well, I see a kind of triangle in Trinity between our:
- entrepreneurship education,
- our interdisciplinary international research collaborations,
- and the funnel which creates campus companies.
In the academic year just gone by, 13 campus companies were founded, so we know we’re getting something right, but we constantly seek to improve.
My ambition is to strengthen all three and to get them working in dynamic synergy, so that staff and students, collaborating with partners around the world, emerge with viable ideas that find investment and industrial partners, thus helping to grow the economy and improve society.
(3) TRINITY AND IRELAND
In conclusion, I’d like to lead on from Trinity to Ireland.
Trinity’s strengths in interdisciplinarity and internationalisation are reflected in Ireland’s strengths. Ireland is a country of deep cultural strengths, particularly in the fields of literature and music, for which we are known around the world. Recent investments have made us increasingly strong in biosciences and ICT, and in logistics and advanced manufacturing. So, our national strengths are also multidisciplinary.
We’re an outward looking country with a long tradition of emigration and a huge global diaspora. There are Irish communities in most countries in the world, including, of course, India. And many multinational companies today base their European operations in Ireland.
I think it’s important in Ireland, like in Trinity, we play to our strengths. I don’t think we should put all our eggs in one basket. We shouldn’t focus solely on a number of areas but should retain interdisciplinarity so as to be adaptable to technological and cultural changes. Specialisation may work for some universities and some countries but I don’t think it’s the best use of Ireland’s or Trinity’s strengths.
It’s early days yet and Irish innovation is not at the level of, say, California, so we don’t yet know what our ‘Valley’ will look like. But my hunch is that it will be broad-based innovation, which will involve partnering with institutes and industries round the world, and which will, I hope, make surprising connections between different disciplines and different areas. I foresee many knowledge triangles around the globe which will overlap in Dublin to create a ‘pyramid’ that is vibrant and unique.
As I hope has been clear from my talk, we very much want Indian universities, Indian businesses and Indian entrepreneurs in all their great diversity to be part of that pyramid.
Thank you very much.
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